Is a cross-country move a great way to put a Band-Aid on your problems? You bet it is.
At the end of 2007, I did exactly that. After twenty-five years, I left my home state of Texas—the land of big skies and big highways—to move more than 1,500 miles east to Washington, DC—the land of cherry blossoms and public discourse.
I made a snap decision after a staff meeting on a hot day in July. Among the more mundane updates that day, my boss shared a significant piece of news: “There’s been a reorganization, and it’s possible some of us are going to be spending a little bit more time in the DC office.”
Moments after the meeting ended, I followed him to his office and said, “If you’re looking for volunteers, I’m in.” I’d never even been to DC.
Within six weeks, I’d packed up and sold my house in Austin and moved into a cute little row house on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, within walking distance to the US Capitol building. “I’m on an adventure!” was all I would say to people who asked, “Isn’t this all a little sudden?”
The truth is, the move provided a huge distraction from the devastation the previous five years of my life had brought me. I could focus on all the logistics of the move and the discovery of a brand-new life. I also got a lot of attention from colleagues who thought I was brave in deciding to leave home while envious at the professional growth I would gain in a new, expanded role.
The frenzied change allowed me to avoid fully grieving years’ worth of traumatic experiences. These included the early death of both my parents, a lost adolescence and early adulthood, and the bitter end of my first marriage after my spouse cheated on me.
Yet, less than a year later, the cracks in my Band-Aid plan were beginning to show. The novelty of the move had worn off, and I realized I didn’t even like the professional role I was in. I was frustrated I wasn’t making more progress on my personal and professional goals. I didn’t feel happy or fulfilled. Maybe it was time to start over again? Moving across the country didn’t work. So, I thought, “Maybe I need to reinvent my career.”
I took some time to journal and write out the subject matter and experiences that were important and motivating to me. One of the things I had written was that I wanted to help people one-on-one with their finances, including working on financial literacy.
As I penned this aspiration, I immediately thought, “That’s not where I can put my focus right now. I have to concentrate on making the right moves in my current career trajectory.” I took pride in being a realist.
As a federal lobbyist advocating public policy work for the state of Texas, it wasn’t clear to me how I could ever parlay that experience into personal finance. Since I wasn’t on the personal finance career path, I had no clue. I believed what I wanted to do didn’t exist or that I’d have to become famous to have a platform. Meanwhile, the more well-known and common career paths within this field, such as becoming an investment banker or stockbroker, weren’t appealing to me. So, I pushed my personal goal aside and did nothing to make it happen.
Flash forward eight years. By all accounts, I was a success story. I had found new career goals and climbed the corporate ladder. I got closer to my goal of working in finance—at least in the public policy realm—and was well paid and well known in financial circles. I was respected as a sought-after speaker and author on financial regulation for a global news and data organization. I was inching closer to working directly in personal finance.
I enjoyed filling up my life with “to-do’s” and achievements. On top of working full time, I was completing an executive MBA program while also traveling every other week between New York and Washington, DC, for work. The travel alone would be exhausting for anyone—but I thought, “Why not get my MBA?” It was something I always wanted to do, and it would check the box off my list. But even though I was a high achiever with corporate recognition, I was not living my best life.
Contentment was elusive. I experienced burnout regularly, along with bouts of depression. I lost track of the number of times I found myself crying in the work bathroom. Being outwardly successful wasn’t enough—I was unhappy, stressed, and worried that despite all I was doing, I wasn’t enough.
In 2015, the exhaustion caught up with me. I felt like I couldn’t take on one more thing. I was increasingly frustrated and depleted by almost any task I took on—personal or professional. I finally realized I’d been filling up my life with busyness and overachievement because it made me feel like I was worth something. I also started to recognize this type of overwork didn’t begin when I took on the extra travel or the MBA. It had been decades in the making.
So, on the day before my last MBA group presentation, and a week before graduation, I gathered up a lot of courage and quit my job. I graduated and then took a six-month sabbatical from any work. For the first time in years, I set aside my incessant need to do more and more so I could feel like I mattered.
The break was transformational. It led me to start my own business in—you guessed it—personal finance. And as I look back on it, I wonder why it took me more than eight years to get where I wanted to be.
Interestingly, I’m not the only one who has a story like this. As I started working one-on-one with clients, giving them the clarity and confidence to see that their finances could allow them to live the lives they were meant to, I noticed a pattern. Far too many of us aren’t living the lives we dream of out of fear, uncertainty, or simply inertia. And this is not because we lack success or the will to work for it. For many of us, our drive toward outward success is a symptom that needs to be treated before we are able to live our best lives.
Here’s how this shows up in real life. A 2015 Deloitte study discovered that 77 percent of respondents experienced burnout in their current position—feelings of energy depletion, negativity, or cynicism about work, and/or reduced personal and professional capacity. As it turns out, another study linked this high rate of burnout to health care spending and mortality, finding that more than 120 thousand US deaths per year are associated with workplace overwork.
For years, we’ve read articles and had discussions about how imposter syndrome gives us limiting beliefs, making us feel unworthy to pursue our big dreams. But did you know just how prevalent imposter syndrome is? Studies dating back to the ’80s show up to 70 percent of us experience it. It turns out the stronger your overachieving tendencies are, the more likely you’ll feel like an imposter.
Personally, I’m the kind of person who craves understanding. It’s motivating to understand not just how prevalent these beliefs are, but why they are so prevalent and why so many of us aren’t living our biggest dreams.
In my experience talking with friends and with clients, I’ve found that nearly everyone believes they’ll tackle their dreams “one day.” The problem with this approach is all those other years in between when we’re giving in to workaholism, burning ourselves out, traveling to another state or country, or job-hopping to get ahead. It feels like we’re always trying to achieve yet another thing on our list that is not related to our big dream.
“You’re such a good student,” they said. “You’re so strong. We’re proud of all your success and how well you’ve done for yourself.” No matter how many times I heard this, I didn’t feel like enough. A six-figure career, being published, appearing on TV; none of this success brought lasting fulfillment or happiness for me. Upon deeper reflection, I discovered these feelings of not being good enough date back to the way I grew up.
My parents were alcoholics, meaning that a lot of the time they weren’t paying attention to me or my needs. I learned from an early age to be hyper-focused on everyone else’s needs and feelings as a coping mechanism. On top of that, I felt the need to do everything I could to appear like I had it all together and didn’t need any help. I didn’t want to make waves in the family and add complexity to an already complex situation. Becoming an overachiever earned me a lot of outside validation and praise, but it also helped me hold the family together.
Both my parents died of alcoholism-related diseases within two years of one another. As the oldest of three, I was suddenly in charge of not only managing their estates, but also taking care of my two younger siblings. At the age of twenty-two, I became the guardian of my sixteen-year-old sister, which was an unbelievable amount of responsibility to be handed to a young adult.
However, I was always given and took on way too much responsibility because of the household I grew up in. In fact, becoming the guardian of my sister was probably one of the least challenging responsibilities I experienced as a child and young adult. All of this has lasting effects on me today, especially, I learned, as it relates to pursuing my deepest dreams.
Sadly, the topic of trauma and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is still so loaded and focused on either treating members of the military returning from war or what I call “capital-T,” event-related Trauma like abuse, assault, or injuries. Within the realm of PTSD, there’s significantly less focus on the millions of us who grew up in households that seem okay from the outside, but actually lacked basic support, communication, and understanding.
In addition, these public discussions about trauma often focus on physical and mental health, but not on how they relate to our career and finances. Studies show that 64 percent of us have experienced one or more Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs—a list of ten specific types of experiences that include having a parent with a mental health issue or experiencing divorce or neglect. Based on that fact, it’s rare to be a person who grows out of childhood free of adversity. Yet no one is making these linkages between our early struggles and how they affect our ability to find contentment in our calling.
I believe trauma is the root cause behind much of our limiting beliefs. Given how widespread traumatic experiences are, this undoubtedly has an impact on our ability as a society to act on our biggest dreams. The good news is that going through trauma also creates resiliency. When we channel our resiliency in the right way instead of letting our coping mechanisms take center stage, we can find more purpose in our lives.
Starting with my sabbatical, I embarked on a new inner journey—one that was not achievement-focused, but rather more exploratory in nature and without expectation. It gave rise to a self-employed career that affords me time for service to others and introspection. I have been able to create a life for myself that has more balance, more purpose, and most importantly less stress, fear, and pain. I want to help you find that, too.
In the The Resiliency Effect, together we’ll dive into why this happens to us and learn from other people about how they’ve found and acted on their true callings without suffering financially. We’ll talk more about what trauma and ACEs are, why it’s important to acknowledge the double-edged sword of resiliency, and how you can turn your experiences into opportunity. We’ll also talk about how to unlearn coping mechanisms that may be getting in your way and what you can do instead. Finally, we’ll give you some actionable insights and journal prompts to sort through your thoughts so you can take steps to launch your biggest dreams.
This is an excerpt from The Resiliency Effect: How to Own Your Adversity to Act on Your Biggest Dreams. To read more, check out the book here.
